“This is Tom, he’s security,” the club owner said, leaning on the back of Tom’s chair. “I got him to come over right after I told you guys about the-” He grimaced, and gestured vaguely towards outside, “body. I thought you’d be wanting to see the CCTV footage, and I know jack-squat about all the tech stuff.”
“Have you found anything?” Sedgwick asked Tom directly.
The man nodded silently and pressed play on the screen, turning it towards Sedgwick. Stephen and I stayed close behind, looking around Sedgwick to be able to see the screen.
It was in black and white and fairly grainy, and it showed the alleyway behind the club. Two pairs of couples stumbled across the screen, looking plastered, before a hooded figure appeared and all of us straightened, the tension in the small security room palpable.
I couldn’t tell if the figure was a man or woman, but I would’ve guessed a man. They were bulky, and even from the grainy video alone, I could tell that they were very tall. Their hood covered their head entirely, which they kept down, like they knew the camera was there. They walked across the alleyway, looking up and down several times before they walked back again, off-camera.
“Is that it?” Sedgwick asked, leaning back with a frown on his face.
Tom, the security guy, put up a hand. It took a minute or so before the figure returned, and my stomach tightened when I saw that they were carrying something over their shoulder, wrapped in black plastic. It was about the size of a large carpet, but I knew that no-one in the room thought it was anything but the unfortunate woman outside. But the figure just walked straight across the screen, not raising their face once, heading towards the little side alley where the body now lay. The time at the bottom of the screen showed that it’d happened around six o’clock in the morning, late enough that even the most determined clubbers had staggered either home or to McDonald’s, but early enough that the club’s cleaners or other staff wouldn’t be in yet. It all seemed planned to me.
At least we knew, now, that the student definitely hadn’t been killed outside the club but placed there. Why, I wasn’t sure.
“She’d been wearing club clothes, though,” I said, thinking aloud. Several heads turned towards me, including Sedgwick’s. “She was moved to outside this club,” I explained, “but she’d gone out tonight, it looks like. She wasn’t taken from her room.”
“Unless the killer dressed her,” Sedgwick pointed out.
I nodded in acknowledgement, but the club owner was shaking his head. “No, she’d been here earlier in the night. I had Tom look for her after he found the outside footage.”
I raised my eyebrows, impressed by these two’s thoroughness, and Sedgwick looked similarly gratified to have the information.
“Can we see that? Does it have a timestamp?” he asked.
Tom nodded, seeming to be a man of few words. He brought up another tab on the computer and pressed play on the second clip of security footage, which was from a camera positioned at the front of the club and recorded those queueing outside the front doors to get their IDs checked. A few seconds in, there was the student, wearing the same outfit. She was with her friends and laughing, staggering a little like she’d already gotten tipsy at the pre-drinks. The time on that footage was around eleven, fairly soon after the club had opened.
“So she was targeted from the club,” Sedgwick said. “But she wasn’t killed here. Have you got footage of her leaving?”
The club owner looked at Tom, who shook his head. “Haven’t found her yet,” he said.
“Alright, if you can keep looking, that’d be very helpful, and we’ll need the other footage too, please. Unedited.” He gestured to his partner. “DI Greene will tell you where to send it,” he added, before he headed back outside.
“You think they’ll shut the uni?” Stephen asked quietly, as we left the security guy to his work looking through the long night of footage.
I pulled a face. “I doubt it. It didn’t happen on university grounds.”
We left Sedgwick talking to the forensics team outside, who were zipping up the body, and headed back to our car.
“Do we talk to Gaskell about the cases possibly being connected?” Stephen said, as we got in the car. Stephen took the driver’s seat this time, and I made sure my belt was locked in.
I hummed. “I don’t know. We could wait until the post-mortem examination is back in, to see how the woman was killed. If it’s strangling, I’d say that the connection is strong. Otherwise, it could be dismissed as similarities.”
Stephen reversed us out the car park and back onto the road. It was getting near lunchtime, and despite what we’d just seen, my stomach was grumbling about me missing breakfast.
“True. I just think…” Stephen trailed off, looking uncertain, which was a look that didn’t sit well on his face.
“Go on,” I said, though I thought I could guess what he might say.
He glanced at me. “I’m just concerned that if they are connected then, this person, this killer, they’re escalating, you know? And fast. Going from killing birds to students? I know the evidence is shaky right now, but I feel we should give Gaskell a heads up.”
He was right. “Yeah, I agree. He might not believe us, but it’s worth a try. And then we’ll have to wait for the post-mortem results.”
Stephen nodded. We stopped off at Greggs on the high street for a couple of sausage rolls and sandwiches. I munched on the pastry, getting it all over my trousers, as we drove back to the station and climbed out of the car. The sky had greyed over whilst we’d been at the club crime scene, and I frowned up at it.
“Thinking of that run again?” Stephen asked.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said, flicking through my phone to find the weather app. Which said that it would rain around five. Dammit.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Stephen said, entirely unconvincingly.
I turned to him as we walked up the station stairs towards our floor. “What about when you did rugby, huh?” I said. “You must’ve done plenty of running then, and extra fitness off the field too, right?”
“Sure did,” he agreed easily. “Hated every minute. Only put up with it because I liked the game so much.”
I rolled my eyes. “I give up.”
Gaskell’s office door was open as we walked past and I slowed my walk without quite meaning to. I could only hear Gaskell’s side of the conversation, but it sounded like he was talking to the university. Gaskell saw me hovering there, and I quickly started up walking back to my desk. Gaskell sent me a pointed look as he got up to close his door.
“What was he saying?” Stephen asked.
I took a final bite of my cooling sausage roll before squashing the paper into a ball. “Not quite sure. Talking to the uni, I think.”
Stephen nodded. “Even if they don’t close down, they’d be wise to put in some extra security measures.”
“Agreed.” I aimed and threw the balled-up paper bag over towards the bin in the corner of the room, and fist-pumped the air when it actually went in. “Did you see?” I demanded, turning to Stephen, fully aware I was acting like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. He looked grudgingly impressed.
“You should’ve done basketball, not running.”
I scoffed, about to retort when Gaskell opened his office door again and gestured at Stephen and me to come over.
I cursed quietly. “Am I gonna get told off now?” I said under my breath as I got up, and Stephen followed.
“Fifty-fifty chance, I’d say.”
“Thanks, Huxley.”
We walked over to Gaskell’s office, where he was waiting with the door open, and shut it behind us. He raised his eyebrows at me as he sat down behind his desk, and we sat opposite.
“Well?” he said. I looked back at him, at a loss. He waved a hand impatiently. “Have you figured out who left the birds outside the student’s door?”
I grimaced. “Not quite, sir. There was a second incident that was the work
of a copycat, and he’s being processed, but we haven’t managed to catch the first yet.” Gaskell looked displeased, and I hardly thought it was the best time to explain Stephen and I’s theory, but we needed to anyway.
“There seem to be some startling similarities between Sedgwick’s case and the birds, sir,” I started.
“Really?” Gaskell said, sounding extremely doubtful.
I nodded, ticking items off my fingers. “There're links to the university and the students, and both incidents happened pretty close together, but that could be a coincidence. Then there’s the neatness of the killings, and, most significantly, the positioning of the body into a pose and then being left out to be discovered. Those aspects track across the birds and the student.” Gaskell frowned at me. “The birds were strangled, we were told, so if the student’s post-mortem examination points to her having been strangled too, we believe it would be likely that the cases are linked, sir.”
Gaskell was silent for a long moment. “I’m not convinced,” he said finally. “But,” he held up a hand when I went to argue, “we’ll see what the post-mortem tells us shortly.”
“I’m concerned about Abby’s safety,” I said. “If it is the same person, then they might target her next-”
Gaskell hummed. “It’s a reach, Mitchell.” He looked at me for a long moment, and I looked back. “The post-mortem will be done by tomorrow or the day after,” he concluded. “We’ll see what measures need to be taken after that comes back. Until then, tell the student to stay with her friends and not go out alone.”
I pressed my lips together. Gaskell hadn’t entirely dismissed us, but he also hadn’t been convinced enough to have someone stationed outside Abby’s building.
“Yes, sir,” I said reluctantly. I thought about the student who’d died at the club. She’d arrived with her friends, and yet she’d still been targeted. “Do we know the identity of the student who died?” I asked.
Gaskell glanced down at the paperwork on his desk. “Hannah Clements. She’d only been in York a week. Her parents have been informed.”
I closed my eyes briefly, a wave of sadness passing over me, before I focused back on the task of catching the person who’d done this.
“And did they find the footage-?”
“Mitchell,” Gaskell cut me off. “This isn’t your case. Until there’s more evidence that it really is linked to yours, this is Sedgwick’s, and I trust him to deal with it. You’ve got until the end of the week on the case you’re on, and then you’ll both be moved to something else. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I gritted out. It was a Wednesday, so that only gave us three days, including today.
As Stephen and I walked back to our desks, I promised myself that I’d try my damnedest to figure this one out before Gaskell booted us onto another case. I hoped the post-mortem would show that my hunch was correct, but until then, we had work to do.
Seven
Despite Stephen and I’s best efforts, we didn’t manage to extract any new leads from the information we had, and by the time Friday rolled around, I was getting frustrated.
“The post-mortem’s meant to come in today,” Stephen offered, as I was brooding over another cup of coffee, my third already, and it wasn’t yet lunchtime.
I sighed. “True.”
We’d worked with the tech guys to try to get anything more from the website, but there was nothing. I’d checked with Sam in the lab, but she’d only been able to confirm that the second bird killings hadn’t been the same as the first, which we knew. We’d talked again to Dan, who was out on bail and didn’t know any more about the first dead birds left outside Abby’s door than we did. In fact, he knew even less, because he’d not even seen them before they were removed or seen the photos of them. We talked again to the flatmates, particularly the ones that’d been out the first time we visited but didn’t gain much from them. We talked to Abby herself again too, but I’d hoped the flatmates might be able to tell us something that Abby was too afraid to. No luck there.
I was staring at my computer, trying to think of another angle we could come at the case by, before Gaskell broke my thought process by beckoning us over to his office. I perked up, hoping it would be something useful, and preferably about the post-mortem. Gaskell had his office phone to his ear and was nodding as he listened as he waved us inside and I closed the door.
“Thank you for informing us. We’ll be over shortly.” Gaskell hung up the phone and looked at us, steepling his hands on the desk. He looked serious, his mouth set in a thin line.
“There’s been another case of dead creatures being left outside someone’s door,” he said, frowning. “This time, it’s a university lecturer.”
“Oh,” I said eloquently. I hadn’t been expecting that, or not exactly. I had thought that Abby’s case wouldn’t be the end of it, but I’d not quite expected it so soon. “Birds again?”
Gaskell shook his head. “A dead fox.” Stephen made a softly disgusted sound beside me.
“We’ll head over straight away,” I said, and Gaskell nodded, writing down the address and the lecturer’s name for us.
“It’s off-campus,” Gaskell said. “So even if the first case with the student was, for some reason, picked at random, this one certainly wasn’t. Whoever did it had to have known a university teacher lived there.”
I hummed. I didn’t think Abby had been picked at random. The birds left had been too precise to suggest that the person who did it was striking completely without reason, which was unlikely in any case. But it did seem significant that this time, it had happened off campus, as if the perpetrator was deliberately saying that they could reach anywhere.
Gaskell sent us off, and we almost bumped into Sedgwick, who was heading towards Gaskell’s office as we were leaving. He sent us a cold look that was verging on a glare, and I looked at him coolly in response, watching him stalk into the office and pointedly close the door behind him.
“Yeah, he doesn’t like us,” Stephen said. “Or mostly, he doesn’t like you.”
“You think?”
We grabbed our coats from our desks and got on our way, leaving the station and driving back towards the university. I certainly didn’t need directions to navigate the route anymore, with the number of times we had travelled it in the last week or so.
We didn’t go directly to the university, though, but turned off slightly beforehand, and Stephen told me which lanes to take until we reached the lecturer’s house. Her name was Taylor Solomons, Gaskell had written down, and her house was a small but neat terrace, lined up in a tidy row with a number of other such houses along a street a little way off the main thoroughfare. She had a boxy front garden, only about six feet by six feet, which was lined with colourful flowers, despite it being late September now.
We parked up nearby, drawing a few curious looks from people passing, and walked over to Taylor’s door to knock. The dead fox certainly wasn’t still on her doorstep, and I frowned, hoping that it hadn’t been thrown out without any pictures being taken, or thrown out at all in fact.
Taylor answered the door almost immediately, as if she’d been hovering nearby. She was about medium height for a woman and wearing jogging pants and a tank top with a woollen cardigan over the top. Her brown hair, which lay in layered waves, was rumpled and there was a worried line on her brow. She wrapped her arms around herself after she’d opened the door, and I felt immediately protective of her, somehow. She looked about my age or slightly older, but her hunched shoulders made her look smaller and in need of reassurance.
“Hi,” she said quietly. A large tortoiseshell cat rubbed against her leg, its tail curled around her ankle. Taylor lifted a slender hand to point behind us, pulling my attention back to her, and Stephen and I both turned around instinctively, but there wasn’t anyone there.
“Down there,” Taylor prompted, pointing towards the corner of her small garden. I blinked, realising that somehow, I’d failed to spot the dead fox that’d been tucke
d in amongst the plant pots.
“Is that where you found it?” I asked, surprised that she’d even seen it.
But she shook her head. “No, it was on my doorstep, just in front of where you are standing. I didn’t want the neighbours seeing it,” she said apologetically, “so I shifted it down there.”
I hmmed, wishing that she’d left it where it was, but what was done was done. “Did you take a picture before moving it?”
She chewed her lip and shook her head. “Sorry, no. But I didn’t change its position or anything,” she added, “just put it on the cardboard.” She pulled a face that communicated how little she’d wanted to touch the animal, then focused on me, her eyes a very pretty shade of blue. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your names?”
“Oh,” I said, “we forgot to introduce ourselves.” I fished my badge out of my pocket and offered it to her. “I’m DCI Mitchell, and this is DI Huxley.”
She smiled shakily. “Hi. Taylor Solomons.” She held out a hand, and after a second of surprise, I reached out and shook it. Her small hand was cooler than mine, and she lingered a moment before letting go, turning to shake Stephen’s hand briefly.
“Do you want some tea?” she asked, looking at me again.
“Uh, sure, thanks,” I said, and Stephen nodded too.
She headed back into the house, the cat trotting after her with its tail in the air, and I released a breath. Stephen started chuckling beside me, before he elbowed me.
“What?” I said, though I couldn’t put much conviction into my glare. Stephen wiggled his eyebrows.
“I think someone’s got a crush on the teacher, hm?” he teased.
“Oh, shut up,” I muttered. I pulled my thoughts away from Ms Solomons’ blue eyes and walked over to frown down at the poor fox on the piece of cardboard. It laid in the shadow, and I couldn’t make it out too clearly in today’s dull light.
Campus Killings Page 7